Innholdsfortegnelse for 19 September 2022 i India Today

Political motives, overlapping and separating, always in a flux, hardly follow the narrow and straight. The latest development to rock Jammu and Kashmir politics—the exit of veteran leader and former J&K chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad from the Congress on August 26—traces precisely such a surprising arc. As Azad announced the floating of his own national outfit, there began an exodus of former legislators and party workers from the Congress, leaving it denuded of leadership in Jammu and Kashmir. As many as 36 leaders have quit the party to join Azad. Starting his political journey from Jammu, where he addressed a rally on September 4, Azad received a rousing reception and announced his as-yet-unnamed party’s main agenda: restoration of J&K’s statehood and land rights to locals—both annulled along with Article…

An uneasy calm prevailed at Chitradurga’s famous Murugha matha this past weekend, shaken as it was by allegations that the 64-year-old pontiff, Shivamurthy Murugha Sharanaru, had sexually assaulted two minor girls who had been staying in a hostel run by the matha. The pontiff was arrested on September 1, nearly a week after an FIR was registered against him following the testimony of the two teenagers, aged 15 and 16. The alleged sexual abuse, one of them said in the complaint, had taken place over a period of three years. While the police faced criticism for delaying the arrest of the pontiff, Karnataka’s political parties have shied away from public comment. Nestled between two lakes against a backdrop of rocky hillocks on the Chitradurga-Davanagere highway in central Karnataka, Sri Jagadguru…

WHAT THE LAW SAYS The Centre has made it mandatory for automakers to provide three-point seat belts for all front-facing passengers in a car. Under Rule 138(3) of the Central Motor Vehicle Rules, a person “seated in the front seat” or “occupying front-facing rear seat” is required to wear a seat belt. Failure to do so may result in a fine of Rs 1,000. However, many ignore the rules for even front-seat passengers, not to speak of those sitting in the rear. WHY YOU SHOULD WEAR SEAT BELTS When a car hits a moving or stationary object at a high speed, the passengers are thrown towards the front of the vehicle with a great velocity Passengers not seated upright and without seat belts can hit the seat in front of…

It took Sukash Chandrashekhar two months to get through to Jacqueline Fernandez. When he finally did, the two clearly hit it off. Apart from showering Fernandez with expensive presents, which the Enforcement Directorate lists in its chargesheet, Chandrashekhar also gave her a highly undervalued gift: attention. A person acquainted with the actress says that she did err in judging Sukash, but that he had a “very charming personality”. Jacqueline fell for it. The 37-year-old actress and Miss Universe Sri Lanka came to Mumbai in 2009 on a modelling assignment. Her father, Elroy Fernandez, was both a DJ and a salesman, and her mother, Kim, of Malaysian and Canadian descent, was an air hostess. In Mumbai, Jacqueline successfully auditioned for Sujoy Ghosh’s Aladin (2009), which marked her debut. But it wasn’t…

Inside Delhi’s Rohini jail complex, Sukash was allotted an entire barrack (No. 204), usually shared by 15-20 inmates. He enjoyed several luxuries, including his own BMW car inside the prison to ferry the occasional guests. The car reportedly had a sticker of the Tihar Jail. He had amenities such as air-conditioning, smartphones and television while other inmates washed his clothes and utensils. CCTV cameras in his barrack were blocked using curtains and mineral water bottle boxes. When he was out on interim bail in November 2020 to perform his father’s last rites, he allegedly stayed out of jail for six months “under mysterious circumstances”. These privileges came for a price. According to the Delhi Police chargesheet, deputy jail superintendent D.S. Meena used to collect Rs 60-75 lakh every fortnight from…

WHEN KHUSHBOO SINGH, 37, AND HER husband Shubham Tandon, 39, decided to go for a bigger car four years ago as a replacement for their Maruti Swift, they chose a Renault Duster SUV. It served the couple, then based in Gurugram, well, since it gave them ample space to accommodate their two pet golden retrievers and other close relatives when they went on long drives. The couple, who moved to Pune earlier this year, as Tandon got a job with the city-based Bajaj Finserv, decided to upgrade to a Hyundai Alcazar, a seven-seater that cost them Rs 25 lakh, since the dogs needed more space as they grew up. They paid for the car, delivered to them in August-end, partly from the money they got by selling the old car,…

Andhra Pradesh has been a frontrunner in implementing Natural Farming (NF) on a mass scale. The state government initiated the Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNM) initiative in 2016. “The Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) initiative [ZBNM has since been renamed]has got 630,000 farmers promoting NF, making it the largest such programme in the world,” claims T. Vijay Kumar, executive vice-chairperson of Rythu Sadhikara Samastha (RySS). It has identified champion NF farmers as community resource persons (CRPs) to act as mentors to the new converts. NF follows traditional organic farming practices based on local resources, botanical extracts (such as neem for pest control) and indigenous seeds. “RySS has used farmer-to-farmer experiential knowledge as a means to empower 8,000 CRPs across the state,” says Vijay Kumar. Each CRP is expected…

In January 1921, a bedraggled mendicant showed up in Bhawal, a zamindari estate now in Bangladesh. The town was agog—this man looked a lot like Ramendra Narayan Roy, a prince who had died in 1909 from a serious, if mysterious, ailment while convalescing in Darjeeling. The new arrival was presented to the aristocratic family, who, upon closer inspection, came to be convinced this was indeed “mejo kumar”, or the long-dead Ramendra Narayan. At first, the stranger denied he was the prince, but soon enough, he changed his stand. He could not only recall specific incidents, names and people, but he also spoke of memories an imposter could never have known. But there was one significant sceptic. Bibhavati, his young widow, refused to meet, let alone accept this man claiming to…

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METRO-3 CAR SHED Thackeray: Shifted the metro car shed to Kanjurmarg from Aarey Milk Colony, a site that had evoked a lot of protest over green concerns Result: Project got stuck as Kanjurmarg land is under litigation; cost increase: Rs 10,000 crore Shinde: Brought car shed back to Aarey saying the Supreme Court has cleared project site Status: Project has taken off again. Trial run conducted on Aug. 30 for underground metro line Impact: Green activists relaunch agitation. SEEPZ-Bandra leg may be complete by June ’23 BULLET TRAIN TERMINUS Thackeray: Denied land to the National High Speed Railway Corporation Ltd (NHSRCL) to construct terminus at Bandra-Kurla Complex Result: Project delayed by two years; cost overruns: Rs 12,000 crore Shinde: Orders removal of a Covid care centre set up on demarcated…

ValankaAlemao, a Trinamool Congress member and CEO of Churchill Brothers, one of India’s most successful football clubs, on September 2 became the first woman to be elected executive committee member of the All India Football Federation (AIFF) in its 85-year history. It did not come easy; 10 members had challenged her nomination by the Goa Football Association. Now, with AIFF president and ex-footballer Kalyan Chaubey of the BJP as colleague, her father Churchill Alemao, former Goa CM, might get a chance to cosy up to the BJP to stay relevant in state politics. Valanka herself lost the 2017 and 2022 Goa polls.…

NOTHING ABOUT HIS APPEAR-ANCE INVITES YOU to cast a second glance at Sukash Chandrashekhar. Ordinary of build, average in height—5 feet, 9 inches—the 33-year-old looks a regular guy. When in school in Bengaluru, his friends teased him as Karia—the Kannada word for black—for his dark complexion. There is nothing flashy about his clothes either; he would mostly be found in denims with a tee. He has four fingers missing on his left hand. Nobody knows how he lost them—in an accident or if someone chopped them off. But you don’t get to see the hand—he always keeps it hidden in his trouser pocket. What you cannot miss, though, is his right hand, sporting some of the world’s most expensive watches. Or the cars he drives—a fleet of top-end marques, among them…

1 On June 15, 2020, Sukash Chandrashekhar, sitting in Delhi’s Rohini Jail, first calls on the cellphone of Aditi Singh, wife of former Ranbaxy owner Shivinder Singh, lodged in Tihar Jail since 2019. Sukash uses a spoof app because of which the number displayed on Aditi’s cellphone is one of those listed for the Union home ministry. Introducing himself as Union law secretary Anoop Kumar, he says he is calling on the instruction of the PMO. He tells Aditi that because of Shivinder’s expertise in healthcare, the government wanted to include him in a top panel to be formed to fight Covid, and would therefore help the jailed businessman get out on bail soon. 2 Later in the day, Sukash calls again, this time as Abhinav, under-secretary to Anoop Kumar, and repeats…

The clangour in the background—the awful sound of an alliance breaking, the footfalls of central sleuths—spoke of a battle of attrition. Not exactly tense, but taut with action, and without a lot of room for missteps. Nitish Kumar, Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal (United) chief, had just gone back to a friend-turned-foe-turned-friend. And CBI teams, playing in perfect time like a crack percussion section, had descended on the premises of five Rashtriya Janata Dal leaders, including two Rajya Sabha MPs. This is a fairly accurate freeze-frame of the state of play as the BJP primes for the 2024 polls. A curious dichotomy attends to the situation: the big picture seems comfortable enough, with the Opposition taking the field in a state of disarray, but the details hold not a…

IT IS A WEEKDAY, BUT THE FOREST department’s range office in Lateri, a town in Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha district, bears a deserted look. Almost 20 days after the department’s staff were booked for murder over the death of a youth, things seem to have changed forever. In a mix of low morale and fear—both of the government whose forests they are to protect, and members of the Bhil tribal community to which the deceased youth belonged—the staff members at the range have stopped wearing their uniforms. They have also surrendered their official guns, refusing to carry them until the government guarantees them some legal protection. Lateri is one of the biggest timber smuggling hotspots in MP. Vidisha district, which was in pre-Independence times part of Scindia territory, had some of…

Waste management follows a circular economy at the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD). Flower offerings to the deities at Tirumala and other temples are no longer dumped after they are spent. Since September 2021, the floral refuse is sent to an exclusive facility at the S.V. Gosamrakshana Shala in Tirupati where 80 workers turn it into high-quality, fragrant incense sticks. Some 1 million sticks are produced every day. Fromthe mixing of ingredients to packaging, every process is done inhouse. “TTD wanted the downstream use of the flower waste to have a devotional connection and zeroed in on incense sticks,” says T.S. Harsha, director, Darshan International, a major player in the incense stick industry. His company gifted a dehumidifier that dries the huge volumes of flowers without their losing their colour and…

What delightful subversions she creates, the diminutive Anupam Sud—so painfully shy, so brazenly confrontational—as she lays bare the anatomies of virile men with taut torsos and women with voluptuous breasts, stopping just coyly short of exposing their genitals. Her protagonists feast on each other’s bodies, but the food on their tables is a more contested space. Apples and serpents suggest temptations as she mocks Draupadi’s husbands for their impotency in protecting her honour. She mines physical relationships that explore the illicit while remaining respectful of middle-class morality. Her feisty contexts allow both feminism and femininity to co-habit. Between Vows and Words, a career-defining retrospective on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, investigates all of this—Sud’s excoriating indictments of social and political vulnerabilities and masochism thinly…

In recent years, the Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy had developed an image of being controlled by a few officers with a huge, even disproportionate, role in major decisions. Awanish Awasthi, a 1987 batch IAS officer, and his 1988 batch compeer Navneet Sehgal were the stars—two of chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s most trusted aides, entrusted with the keys to the kingdom. Suddenly last week, everything changed. Awasthi, additional chief secretary (ACS) for home, vigilance and a host of other key departments, had his retirement date coming up on August 31, but the buzz was he would get an extension. Not only did that not happen, just hours after his retirement, even ACS Sehgal, widely seen as the CM’s troubleshooter, was shunted out from the high-profile information and MSME departments to the modest…

Tragedies caused by appalling neglect regularly visit the state-run healthcare system in India. Consider the deaths of 63 children in Gorakhpur’s BRD Medical College and Hospital in 2017 due to a lack of oxygen cylinders, or the death of 15 women in Chhattisgarh in a sterilisation campaign in 2014. In a similar instance, botched sterilisation procedures at a state-run Community Health Centre (CHC) at Ibrahimpatnam, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, on August 25 has led to the deaths of four young women. Wary of the inevitable public furore, the Telangana government rushed in to make amends: a cash grant of Rs 5 lakh and a 2BHK apartment was announced for the families of each of the deceased. A probe was also ordered into the incident, headed by Dr G. Srinivasa…

The world’s richest Hindu shrine is going organic. The hilltop Sri Venkateswara temple is now using indigenous cow products and produce from chemical-free natural farming for all its sacred rituals. Be it the butter used for lighting the lamps or the mix for its famous laddoo prasadam, everything comes via the organic route. Temple custodian Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) says it is tapping technology to process the 950 kg of flowers offered every day—they are dried and recycled as incense sticks and other value-added products. This is apart from the spinoff for ayurvedic products developed from panchagavvya, using cow dung, urine, milk, curd and ghee. Indeed, the desi cow is the centrepiece of the TTD initiative. The temple management has expanded its dairy farm and started the Navaneeta Seva—an offering…

In 2019, Sachin Dheeraj, a student of film and media production at the University of Austin, headed to Dang in southern Gujarat to make his pre-thesis film. His subject, he had decided, would be Anaben Pawar, a tribal woman, who, after being accused of witchcraft in 2017, was repeatedly assaulted by men in her village. Earning the trust of a traumatised survivor wasn’t easy. For days, Dheeraj and cinematographer Rohin Raveendran Nair didn’t turn on their camera. They only listened. “She thought I was from the perpetrator’s side and was there to manipulate her,” recalls Dheeraj. “I tried to explain that with her permission, I wanted to take her story to the world. I wanted to preserve her memories, immortalise them through the film.” Pawar gradually opened up. The result:…